


dream as if you’ll live forever

by TheSkyLarkin



Series: The Gap in the Doorway AU [3]
Category: Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Child Injury, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Whump, Flashbacks, Gen, Medical Procedures, Medical Trauma, Mentioned Regis Llewelyn (OC), POV Child, POV Second Person, Suicidal Thoughts, Whump, Whumptober 2020, this poor kid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:53:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26988547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSkyLarkin/pseuds/TheSkyLarkin
Summary: “The Gap in the Doorway” AU: There are only two things getting William Crane through his mysterious, debilitating illness—his books and his dreams. Takes place before the events of the main story.Challenge: Whumptober 2020Prompts: No. 13 - “Breathe In, Breathe Out” “Oxygen Mask”No. 29 - “I Think I Need a Doctor” "Emergency Room” “Reluctant Bedrest”See End Notes for comprehensive warnings/tags
Relationships: Past Roland Crane/Susan Crane (OFC), Roland Crane & William Crane, Susan Crane (OC) & William Crane
Series: The Gap in the Doorway AU [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946533
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	dream as if you’ll live forever

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [a-cup-of-unrealitea](https://a-cup-of-unrealitea.tumblr.com/)/[sageandfoolishwisdom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sageandfoolishwisdom/pseuds/sageandfoolishwisdom), [frelioan](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/frelioan)/[fairyneko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairyneko), and chaosintheavenue ([Tumblr](https://chaosintheavenue.tumblr.com/)/[Ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaosintheavenue/pseuds/chaosintheavenue)) for beta reading!

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. A familiar, mundane rhythm, one that most people do without any thought—like tying their shoes or walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night. But one that has become terribly familiar to you as you lie in your hospital bed, unable to do much else but try to keep breathing. The beeping of the monitors surrounding you seems to increase in pitch, and you close your eyes in order to focus solely on continuing to breathe. Just breathe in...

As if you can will your exhausted lungs into working properly through sheer willpower alone.

Then breathe out...

As if you can simply stave off this unknown _thing_ in your lungs that has been trying to kill you for years now, as well as the malicious side effects of whatever new drug they’ve got you on this time by simply breathing. (The new doctor told you what this one was called, but you can’t remember the name of it right now. They all sound like the names of aliens from a sci-fi story anyway.)

The room fills with noise as Ivan and Sofie—Wasn’t she supposed to be off duty tonight? Something about her niece?—rush in, calling out numbers and terms you would have recognized if you’d been less preoccupied with keeping your defective lungs functioning. You’ve never had a pet due to your allergies, but the familiar weight of something very heavy pressing down on your chest is what you imagine owning a large, fat cat would be like—minus the nice parts, such as having something to pet and cuddle. Instead, you’re left with the sensation of something trying to crush your ribcage, and all the organs within, from the inside.

You don’t even have to open your eyes to recognize the familiar sensation of an oxygen mask being placed over your face. It’s supposed to help you breathe. You never feel like it does. You try to fog up the mask with hot air but only succeed in producing the tiniest exhale. This triggers a coughing fit, and suddenly the creature in your chest is thrashing about, stomping on your organs one by one.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe—

“Hang in there, little buddy,” Ivan says in that thick, husky accent of his as you feel the cold press of an antiseptic wipe on your forearm. He holds you still while Sofie injects the needle into your arm, and you wish it had been Maria or Omar instead because they would have had something earnestly comforting to say or a funny (but probably mildly inappropriate for someone your age) joke for you. You don’t even flinch anymore with the addition of yet another needle piercing your skin, and you open your eyes just a tad to see if it’s attached to yet another IV bag. As you do so, you feel your eyelids flutter closed immediately.

Ah. That must have been the anesthetic, which means they’re preparing you for emergency surgery, which means that the parade of doctors that passes through your room on a weekly basis still hasn’t come up with a cure for your condition… At this point, you can’t even summon the energy needed to feign surprise. Of course this latest attempt was a dud. Why would you hope for anything else anymore?

Ivan’s started the countdown, but you’re already doing your best to let the anesthetic take over and zone out into unconsciousness. After going through this process more times than you can count, you can’t even be bothered to feel any anxiety or trepidation at the thought of being cut open again. Maybe you’ll have some more interesting dreams while you’re under… they’re far more interesting than anything else you could have been doing tonight anyway.

* * *

Your life wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, you were a normal boy for the most part. Sure, maybe you got sick and had to stay home more than the rest of the kids in your class, but at least you went to school at all—Dad said that there were children out there who were so sick that they couldn’t even leave their beds. (He had said that one time when Mom was worried about you missing almost two whole weeks of school but was wholly unprepared for when it actually happened to you.) Your teachers had been worried that you never got into sports and roughhousing like all of the other boys in your class, but Mom and Dad didn’t mind that you preferred to sit and read while the other kids played outside. It was more convenient for them anyway, on account of Dad’s government job and all the security risks it came with.

Then one night, you suddenly woke up coughing and couldn’t stop. It was as if someone had found a way to pour a whole bottle of water into your lungs while you were sleeping. Every breath felt like you were trying to breathe underwater like you were a fish choking on air. You tried to stick your head over the side of the bed in hopes of expelling all this liquid burning up your lungs, but it didn’t seem to help. You could hear your own heartbeat pounding in your ears as you gasped for breath. Although it was almost summer, you felt ice-cold, like you’d been playing out in the snow for way too long.

You thought—no, you _knew_ you needed a doctor.

Dad had been away on a business trip, so if you hadn’t accidentally knocked over your bedside lamp while trying to claw your way out of bed, Mom might not have found you and called an ambulance in time. (You mentioned this to Dad once, and with an ashen face he made you promise to never tell Mom about it.) You couldn’t remember the ambulance ride or arriving at the hospital itself. The next thing you knew, you had awoken in the same boring white room full of strange machines that would be your home for the next few years. Weakly, you tried to remove the cumbersome oxygen mask attached to your face, but a nurse came in to stop you before leaving to fetch the doctor and your parents.

Mom was still in her old pajamas and robe. Her eyes were red and puffy as she clung to Dad, who was still in his rumpled suit with his own haggard expression. They clearly hadn’t got a wink of sleep. The doctor stopped them at the threshold to explain what is going on with you, and they were barely holding back their frustrations at being kept from reaching you as they listened. You couldn’t understand half of the words he said, and the other half was inaudible to you. But whatever he had said didn’t seem to bring your parents much comfort.

Once finally allowed to enter, Mom made a beeline to your side and clasped your left hand (the one that wasn’t attached to the arm an IV) with a watery smile. Dad was not far behind, stone-faced as he stood by Mom, an expression you recognized from when he’d come home from work on a bad day at his old job. In the face of their strange expressions, you said the first thing that came to mind:

“Am I going to die?”

This was clearly the wrong thing to say; the little color remaining immediately drained out of Dad’s face, and Mom nearly burst into tears on the spot.

The doctor (you can’t recall his name or his face now; they came and went over the years without so much as a hello or goodbye) then explained to you that you’d experienced an acute pulmonary edema, which had left you barely able to breathe due to the pockets of extra liquid forming in your lungs. They’d managed to drain out the excess through surgery but were absolutely stumped as to what had caused it in the first place. (You hadn’t even felt sick when you went to bed.) This meant that you’d be staying in the hospital for a few weeks longer while the doctors ran some tests. So it would be a little while before you could go home.

“But hey, look on the bright side, Will: you get to miss school for a couple of weeks!” had been the doctor’s attempt at cheering you up. Mom and Dad were clearly not amused. You didn’t think it was all that funny either.

* * *

Breathe in, breathe out.

Weeks turned into months. Despite the initial success of the surgery, a weight settled into your chest and the doctors said that until the issue with your lungs had been resolved, you would remain in the hospital.

The doctors ran all sorts of tests on you: one day, they had you attached to all sorts of devices while running on a treadmill until you were sure that your lungs were about to explode… and then they still made you keep going until you had almost passed out. On another, they drew so much blood from you that you were surprised that you had any left over at the end of it all. (By the end of the second month, you could already watch a nurse insert a needle into any part of your body and not flinch at all. And as time went on still, you stopped feeling any pain at all when a needle pierced your skin.) And yet they still couldn’t seem to find whatever it was that they were looking for.

Mom and Dad had made a point to visit every day after work and longer on weekends, trying to be as supportive (of you, and of each other—but you don’t realize this until much later) as possible. However, one day you caught Dad loudly complaining about the “ludicrously expensive hospital fees” just outside the door to your room.

“So do something about it, then!” Mom snapped back at him with sudden vitriol. “That’s supposed to be your job!” You heard Dad’s heavy footsteps as he turned around and left without another word. He didn’t return for another half an hour, and both of them acted as if nothing had happened in front of you.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

To break up the monotony of tests and the schoolwork that your teacher sends, Mom started to bring you books from home, and then the library once she ran out. This set off yet another spat in the hallway between her and Dad.

“You don’t even know where any of these books have been; who knows what kind of micro-bacterial contaminants they might have that would worsen Will’s condition?” Dad protested. “Never mind all the dust trapped in the pages and that awful smell… And don’t get me started on the _utter dreck_ you keep letting him read, Susan—”

“Will’s only a child, and he’s stuck in this hospital room with nothing to do with hours on end!” Mon shot back. “For God’s sake, Roland, he’s bored out of his mind!”

In the end, Dad had to concede that it was better than letting you watch TV all day. The next time they visited, your parents arrived with a bag full of brand new books each. Mom brought more of the same fantasy novels: tales of magical worlds, knights and wizards, quests to fight dragons, and epic adventures in distant lands. Stories in which the good guys always won, where the hero always saved the day at the very last minute. You devoured these as if one of them could possibly cure your illness. If you couldn’t even get out of bed most days, an adventure in your head was the next best thing.

Meanwhile, Dad’s selection… You’d at least attempted to read the books about writing, but they were so dense and hard to read that they outright put you to sleep a few times. You had resolved to tell him that maybe you just weren’t old enough for non-fiction yet if he ever asked about the books he’d gotten for you.

But he never did.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out…

Around this time, you started to have recurring dreams about a boy from another world. You woke up in the middle of a sprawling city that was straight out of your fantasy novels: full of dogs, cats, and mice that were walking around on two legs just like the regular people who were also milling about. None of them seemed to notice you in your sudden panic to get out of there and find your way back…

...home? No, if you made it back to your own... world? If you made it back, they’d put you straight back into the hospital again. (You should have known that this was all a dream by the way you were running around without your lungs feeling like they were set ablaze and not a single cough had escaped your lips. But people weren’t supposed to realize that they had been in a dream until they woke up afterward.) So what—

“Hello there!” A cheerful voice called out from behind you. You turned around to see another boy in a regal outfit, who offered to show you one of his favorite spots in the kingdom that he thought you might like. Before you could agree or protest, he grabbed you by the hand and led you to an elegant garden in a quieter part of the city. The other boy stopped at the center of one of the many bridges that crisscrossed the massive pond with ornate fountains and gently flowing waterfalls at the center of the garden and demanded that you tell him a story.

Not even questioning the logic of the dream, you told him the story of the last book you had read. In return, he told you a story about a man with the head of a rabbit who traveled to many worlds and helped people face their nightmares. The two of you kept exchanging interesting stories until the dream ended. When you woke up the next morning, you felt as if the pain in your chest had lessened.

* * *

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

Months turn into seasons. Despite a revolving cocktail of medications, the pain in your chest grew stronger and stronger with each passing day. You’ve woken up in the middle of the night unable to breathe several more times. Just checking that your lungs are working properly became your new morning ritual.

Sometime during that first month, your teacher had sent you a big get well soon card signed by the whole class. (Nowadays, you can barely remember the faces of some of your old classmates.) Ben and Lily, who you usually sat beside at lunch and were the only two kids in your whole school whom you might have considered “friends”, sent cards and some short letters at first. But that had mostly stopped around the third month. (That, or the nurses had finally noticed that you stopped bothering to open the envelopes by that point, and either handed them off to your parents or tossed them in the recycle bin.)

Breathe in...

Mom and Dad’s visits started to get less frequent. Mom at least would call if she couldn’t make it to the hospital, sometimes from the office and sometimes on the speakerphone in the middle of traffic. But Dad would sometimes not show up for a whole week straight with no explanation. (Mom had seemed especially attentive and interested in what you thought of the latest book she’d bought you during these times.) As winter melted into spring, he showed up one day with Mom to reveal why: he was going to run for President of Andoria with Uncle Coby.

Uncle Coby is not actually your uncle by blood. But since Mom’s whole family lives on the west coast or out of the country (and Dad doesn’t talk about his side of the family), Dad’s oldest work friend who had never missed one of your birthdays had pretty much declared himself your uncle and no one had disagreed. He didn’t have a spouse or kids of his own, so he joked that all that latent paternal energy had to go _somewhere_. That year, he had shown up with a massive box of new fantasy novels for you—some of which had not been released to the general public yet—to your Dad’s intense disapproval.

“Yep, I remember being about your age and landing in the hospital for four months with a broken femur,” Uncle Coby recalled in the slightest hint of a southern accent he had when he talked about his own childhood, pointedly ignoring your dad. “That hospital room didn’t even have a TV; I nearly died of boredom!”

So learning that Uncle Coby had dragged Dad into this crazy plan of his wasn’t that surprising. Another important person in the government, Mr. Llewelyn (whom you heard of many times, but never actually saw—Dad said he didn’t like kids), had also been trying to get Dad interested in running for office. The surprising part was Dad actually agreeing to do it.

“Actually, your mom gave me the idea,” Dad admitted. Behind him, Mom had a split second expression of abject fury that she failed to conceal from you. Dad continued on about the messed-up healthcare system in this country, and how the rest of the Party agreed that it needed a serious overhaul for the good of the nation but no one else was willing to run with that issue as their primary platform, but your attention was focused on Mom. She managed to keep up a neutral facade all the way up until the end when Dad regretfully told you that with all the campaigning and the other traveling he’d have to do in the primary stage alone, he probably wouldn’t have a lot of free time to visit you.

“Which is why you’ll be calling him every day instead, won’t you, _dear_?” Mom interjected. Dad either missed the overwhelming passive aggressiveness of the question or chose to ignore it. He did call you—on those occasions when Mom was on the campaign trail with him.

In your parents’ absence, you started to memorize the names and faces of all the nurses in the ward who came through your door. (Dad’s candidacy being accepted by the Party meant that any visitors you received now had to be vetted by Secret Service first. Not that you’d been getting visitors besides your parents and Uncle Coby anyway.) At least they were happy to listen and talk to you. When election season was in full swing, they’d turn on the TV in your room on their breaks and make fun of the silly things the news anchors said for your amusement.

You learned all about Cathy having to send money back to her poor family in her home country, Maria’s son who was about your age and dreamed of being the star player of a professional soccer team, Ivan’s dilemma of staying in his job or following his dream of becoming a full-time freelance photographer, Omar’s struggles to get his conservative parents halfway across the world to accept his husband-to-be before the wedding, and the long, drawn-out dramatic happenings of Sofie’s large extended family. They all agreed that your Dad’s proposed changes to the healthcare industry would make their jobs a lot easier, and they weren’t just saying that because you were his son.

...breathe out.

In your conversations with them and while devouring all of the books that Mom and Uncle Coby brought (you’d even begun to read some of Dad’s writing manuals as more than just a sleep aid—once you could put examples of the other books you’d read to the terminology, it became a lot easier), you began to realize that people are like books. Some people—like Uncle Coby, Maria, Ivan, and Sofie—are open books: their personalities burst forth from every aspect of their beings and it was always easy to discern how they were feeling at any given time. Others—namely Mom, Cathy, and Omar— _seem_ like open books at first, but then you realize that there was a lot more going on beneath the surface.

As for Dad, Dad is a closed book. No… Dad is a closed book that was also shut tight with chains and a myriad of locks. No one ever seems to know what’s going on in his head (not even you or Mom sometimes), and he likes it that way.

The boy from your dreams seemed to like this metaphor. He is a familiar, but slightly obtuse book: one that you’ve reread hundreds of times but still keep finding new things to discover with each pass. A book that speaks to you on a level that no other book has ever before. Despite your many meetings, you and he had never run out of stories to tell each other. He seemed to like the mundane stories of your life before and after your hospitalization just as much as the recollections of the fantastical books you’ve read. You really like the tales of the young king who set out to save the world from a great evil, meeting all sorts of cool friends along the way.

“Will, are you ever going to write a book of your own?” The boy from your dreams asked you one day. The question threw you off guard. Dad’s books on writing made the task seem difficult, but not impossible. Writing your very own book would be pretty cool...

...but would you end up living long enough to ever finish it?

* * *

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

Seasons turn into years. The pain in your chest builds and builds. Nothing is working. The doctors inform your Mom that the disease is spreading to your heart. These four white walls are all you know now. You can’t even remember what your own bedroom back at home looked like anymore. Some days, breathing seems like an impossible task. You wear that oxygen mask so much, you sometimes forget that you have it on.

Dad wins the election. Now instead of just William Crane: the sick kid in Room 23, you are William Crane: the sick kid in Room 23 and the son of the President of the Democratic Union of Andoria. There are always two Secret Service agents posted just outside your door. (They never come in, so you never learn any of their names or faces.)

Now that Dad’s running the country, you only ever see him regularly on TV anymore, addressing the whole nation. Mom is just as scarce too—she decided to keep her old job as well as take on the responsibilities of First Lady of Andoria. When she calls, she always sounds as if she’s on the verge of tears or a breakdown, but she refuses to quit her first job for reasons you don’t quite understand. Mom claims that she doesn’t visit so much to keep the reporters away, but you know that she’s straining underneath the weight of both massive responsibilities. You don’t want to be a burden to her. (More than you already have been, anyway.)

In an attempt to offset your parents’ absences, Uncle Coby visits more. “It’s my job as Vice President to be where your dad can’t,” he explained jokingly the first time, but you think that he’s just trying to get out of some other responsibility instead. You never call him out on this, because he always brings new books and some much-needed company. He tells you funny stories about the other world leaders he’s met, as long as you promise not to tell anyone else. (Who else would you tell?)

You hardly ever see your parents in person anymore, and never the two of them together. Even on TV, they’re only together for important state occasions and photographs. Two and a half years or so after the election, Mom arrives with an announcement: “Your father and I are separating.” You wish that you were more surprised, or saddened by this.

Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

In the face of your family falling apart without you and with your own health failing, you try to leave it all behind and lose yourself in the books. The characters in your stories are never dying of a mystery illness, and even the ones that do get sick always get better in the end. It works… until you get to That Book.

That Book starts off with the main character’s mother dying due to an evil witch casting a spell because of a prophecy that foretells of the main character being the one to stop her evil plans. So, the protagonist is forced to go on a quest to save her by going to another world and finding the heart in that world connected to that of his late mother. The fairy who tells him this claims that if that person in the other world can be saved from an evil wizard, then his mother will be saved…

…but it’s a big fat lie. The protagonist learns that his mother was in fact from the other world, so there’s nothing he can do to bring her back since she died for real. He still completes the quest anyway, and even forgives the witch who was responsible for killing his mother! You wanted to throw That Book at the wall after finishing it, but the lack of strength in your arms just meant that it ended up flopping to the ground beside your bed. After some time spent thinking about it, you realized that it’s not a bad book, you just hated the end for being something that hit too close to home.

In the end, the main character of That Book couldn’t defeat death. And neither will you.

Breatheinbreatheoutbreatheinbreatheoutbreatheinbreatheout—

You’ve never really thought about dying before, at least not as something that happens to kids like you outside of stories, but you don’t think that death should be this drawn-out and tedious. This much waiting, with occasional spurts of false hope. Waiting for your death to happen like this is painful and _boring_.

Death is always an _event_ in your books, something significant. Characters never die slowly in their beds in the middle of the night: they go gloriously in battle, usually sacrificing themselves for someone they love, in a spectacular clash that only lasts a page or two but affects the entire rest of the book. Or they die suddenly and without warning, kicking the whole plot into gear as the rest of the world is shaken by their passing and nothing is ever the same again.

But at least they still go quickly.

What about you? When you die, of course there’ll be a big funeral, but only because of how important your Dad is. And afterward? Your parents will still be separated, and it will have all been because you got sick.

“ _Breathe_ ,” the boy from your dreams demanded suddenly as you tried to explain all of this to him, his voice suddenly turning deadly serious in a way you’d never heard from him before. “William, none of this is your fault! You can’t blame yourself for what’s happening to you or your parents! Sometimes bad things just happen for no reason, sometimes people just can’t resolve their differences and have to stop being together. But _you_ haven’t done anything wrong! And you shouldn’t beat yourself up over things you have no control over!”

“And you can’t give up on living, you just _can’t_! Who else is going to tell me more stories from another world if you do? I… I _forbid_ you to die, so there!”

Despite his petulance at the end, the other boy injected his words with so much authority that all you could do was nod mutely in response. His serious expression melted into a smile as he started a new tale about a prince, a princess, a cobra, and a frog. (“It gets a little mushy in parts, but then it gets cool, I promise!”) And you forget all about your problems for a little while longer.

You only ever realize that you’ve never asked the boy for his name this whole time after you’ve already woken up.

* * *

Breathe in, breathe out.

When you finally wake up from this latest surgery, Mom is there. But she seems… different. Colder somehow, even as she sweetly asks how you’re feeling today. Still careworn and tired, but there is grim resolve in her eyes as she tells you that she wants to try something new that might help with your illness.

“Don’t tell your father,” she tells you sternly as Sofie hooks up a bag of what looks like green slime to an IV drip, and you nod in mute response—that’s about all you have the energy to do right now. Even if you wanted to, when would you even get the opportunity to tell him?

You decide to keep living for her, and the boy from your dreams, if no one else. Even if this doesn’t work—even if nothing works—you resolve not to give in to despair. For their sakes, if not your own.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Constructive criticism is appreciated!
> 
> Notes - A [pulmonary edema](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pulmonary-edema/symptoms-causes/syc-20377009) is an actual medical condition, but the rest of Will’s mystery illness was just made up to suit the plot.
> 
> Triggers/Warnings: Whump of a Minor, Child Injury, Breathing Problems, Medical Procedures, Misplaced Guilt, Brief Suicidal Thoughts


End file.
